Note that these are just average differences
and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a
women’s issue.

It’s a goddamn cornerstone of his whole argument that there’s overlap and I stated the study said there’s no overlap.

Overlap of what? It looks to me like you have assumed he meant an overlap in earnings. I think he’s talking about an overlap of personality traits.

Yes, its absurd when the study literally says agreeable men still make more than dominant women. So agreeableness cannot be a major influence, unless there’s such an enormous counter pressure somewhere that still only applies to men to make up for it, otherwise you’d have the overlap that Damore refers to (the overlap is in agreeableness itself, not the study you claim).

Yes, according to the study agreeable men still make more than dominant women. That means there are other factors, not that agreeableness is not a factor. It’s pretty clear to me Damore knows there are other factors because he listed many other factors in his memo.

In the end, I’m just going to go back to my original conclusion. He’s still making stuff up as he goes. He only cites *some* items and not others. Now maybe *you* found a study that sorta tries to but not really back up his claims, but it falls short.

If Damore’s memo is judged as a scientific paper, it falls well short. If it is judged as an internet message board post, its quality is well above average. His memo is far from comprehensive, but most people don’t bother to back up any of their claims and don’t add a bunch of qualifiers in a vain attempt to avoid offending people. Damore put forth a lot more effort than most people.

The study supports the notion that an increase in agreeableness results in a lower salary (for both sexes), which is all I think Damore really meant for any of that to mean. Agreeableness is one of those things that we don’t need to study to have a general idea of its effects, just like we don’t need a study on niceness to know that nice people are generally more well-liked than jerks. We need studies if we want to start quantifying the effect and if we want to start making predictions, but we don’t need studies to confirm what is a relatively simple phenomenon.

What would be far more interesting to me is not that agreeableness is correlated with lower salaries (that’s pretty boring), it’s the breakdown of agreeableness and its effects by sex. For example, I ran across one study that said there is a significantly greater agreeableness salary differential in men than in women. Unfortunately, all of the studies I’ve run across are behind a paywall, so the most I’ve been able to find is abstracts.

I apologize if I’m all over the place, but its becoming clear that you’re providing an argument James Damore *never* did. So its getting confusing trying to argue against both at the same time.

The language in his memo is not clear enough for us to know, with certainty, precisely what he meant. So we are all interpreting what we believe his assertions were. Because you view Damore as The Enemy, you are interpreting his words in the worst possible light. I don’t view him as The Enemy, so I am trying to interpret his words more generously.